• Read more about Mobomo, LLC Ranks #123 on Inc. Magazine’s List of the Mid-Atlantic Region’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies

Companies on the 2022 Inc. 5000 Regionals Mid-Atlantic list had an average growth rate of 161% percent. 

Vienna, VA, March 15, 2022 – Inc. magazine revealed today that Mobomo, LLC is No. 123 on its third annual Inc. 5000 Regionals: Mid-Atlantic list, the most prestigious ranking of the fastest-growing private companies based in Washington, D.C., Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia. Born out of the annual Inc. 5000 franchise, this regional list represents a unique look at the most successful companies within the Mid-Atlantic region economy’s most dynamic segment – its independent small businesses. 

The companies on this list show a remarkable rate of growth across all industries in the Mid-   Atlantic region. Between 2018 and 2020, these 131 private companies had an average growth rate of 161% percent and, in 2020 alone, they added 7,365 jobs and $1.9 billion to the Mid-Atlantic region’s economy. Companies based in the Richmond and Washington, D.C., areas had the highest growth rate overall.    

Complete results of the Inc. 5000 Regionals: Mid-Atlantic, including company profiles and an interactive database that can be sorted by industry, metro area, and other criteria, can be found at inc.com/mid-atlantic starting March 15, 2022.

“This year’s Inc. 5000 Regional winners represent one of the most exceptional and exciting lists of America’s off-the-charts growth companies. They’re disrupters and job creators, and all delivered an outsize impact on the economy. Remember their names and follow their lead. These are the companies you’ll be hearing about for years to come,” says Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc.

Mobomo — a private company headquartered in the D.C. metro area — is a premier provider of web and mobile development services to commercial businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. We combine technology expertise with disciplines in digital strategy, interactive marketing, and branding to create innovative applications and websites. From private sector companies to government agencies, we have amassed deep expertise helping our clients enhance and expand their existing web and mobile suite.

Interested in learning more about Mobomo? Take a tour of our capabilities, our past performance, the team members who make our clients look so fantastic, and feel free to reach out with any questions you might have

More about Inc. and the Inc. 5000 Regionals

Methodology

The 2022 Inc. 5000 Regional are ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2018 and 2020. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2018. They had to be U.S.-based, privately held, for-profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2019. (Since then, a number of companies on the list have gone public or been acquired.) The minimum revenue required for 2018 is $100,000; the minimum for 2020 is $1 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons. 

About Inc. Media 

The world’s most trusted business-media brand, Inc. offers entrepreneurs the knowledge, tools, connections, and community to build great companies. Its award-winning multiplatform content reaches more than 50 million people each month across a variety of channels including websites, newsletters, social media, podcasts, and print. Its prestigious Inc. 5000 list, produced every year since 1982, analyzes company data to recognize the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the United States. The global recognition that comes with inclusion in the 5000 gives the founders of the best businesses an opportunity to engage with an exclusive community of their peers and the credibility that helps them drive sales and recruit talent.

The associated Inc. 5000 Conference is part of a highly acclaimed portfolio of bespoke events produced by Inc. For more information, visit www.inc.com. 

• Read more about Why Design Thinking is Key

“Design for the user.”

It seems like a common sense approach. After all, if your website or your custom app aren’t designed with the end user in mind, will it get used?

Common sense notwithstanding, there’s a large gulf between the idea of designing for the user and the actual implementation of it. Plans go astray, different stakeholders have different ideas about what the user would want, and of course, there are always practical considerations like timeline and budget to consider.

Fortunately, design thinking can help project teams establish clear markers that keep them on track toward a seamless, positive user experience.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design thinking goes beyond the surface-level “design for the user” philosophy. It involves a highly tangible, iterative process that allows teams to move past their own viewpoints and levels of understanding in order to gain deep insight into the user’s needs and identify new strategies and solutions that might not have been immediately evident.

In short, design thinking is a process that gives teams concrete steps to help them get out of their own heads and into the user’s, to ensure the team is meeting the user’s genuine needs.

How Does Design Thinking Work With UX?

Most models of design thinking involve five steps:

1. Empathize: Understand your user’s pain points and greatest wishes.
2. Define: Figure out what problem the user is experiencing.
3. Ideate: Let creativity run wild and break down assumptions or traditions.
4. Prototype: Build a model that you can test with real users.
5. Test: Learn what works, what doesn’t, and then adjust.

Let’s explore these in more detail, in the context of UX design:

Empathize

The most successful apps and websites are those that were designed with the user firmly in mind. The folks at Interaction Design Foundation agree, saying that UX tasks “can vary greatly from one organization to the next, but they always demand designers to be the users’ advocate and keep the users’ needs at the center of all design and development efforts.”

But to do that, it’s necessary to understand who the user is and what they want and need. It’s also important to recognize if more than one user persona is in the picture.

Here’s an example: Let’s say we want to create a video app for children ages 6 to 12, with kid-friendly content.

In this situation, there are two main users that we need to understand: the children, and their parents.

• The children want intuitive (intuitive for them, not us) navigation, an easy way to binge-watch content from specific creators, and a fun way to interact with the creators and other viewers.
• The parents? They’re concerned about online predators and inappropriate content and want to make sure they have a way to keep an eye on things without having to constantly watch over their child’s shoulder.

These are fairly basic descriptions of user needs – and to really get a good handle on what each end-user wants from the UX, there’s only one foolproof method: talk to them. There is simply no replacement for sitting down with users and getting a first-hand account of what they need, like, hate, fear, enjoy, and find frustrating.

Define

The main challenge in this step is to clearly articulate the problem that needs to be solved, or the need that must be met.

Ideally, near the end of the Define process, there should be a clear answer to the blanks in the statement, “The user needs to _____________ because ________________.”

From there should arise a problem statement for the team to drive towards, such as “Create an easy and accurate way for both users and parents to filter and find video content.”

To get to this point, it’s vital for teams to take the data they gathered during the Empathize stage and process it in an organized, systematic fashion, unpacking the findings and discussing what they mean. A good practice is to keep asking “why,” digging down past surface-level problems and into the deeper, emotion-driven issues. From there, the data can be used to map out a User Journey, breaking down precisely how the user might interact with the app or site and what they’re looking for.

Ideate

In the ideate stage of design thinking, assumptions and constraints are thrown out the window. This can be much harder than it sounds – as we become more experienced, we often fall into certain patterns or draw on our existing knowledge, making it difficult to look at things from a completely different perspective.

In the ideate stage, “stupid” questions are often the key to unlocking new avenues, because those types of questions tend to disrupt long-accepted, “obvious” practices that should have gone challenged long before.

In the context of UX, the Ideate stage is crucial – it is too easy for teams to fall back into best practices or standard ways of designing the user experience. By applying design thinking, a team opens itself up for those “eureka!” moments that are only possible when the mind is open to every possibility, and it’s those moments that lead to groundbreaking design.

Prototype

This is where the rubber meets the road. Once a team has come up with what they think is the best possible way to design the UX for an app or website, they need to test the feasibility of that idea. And they need to test it with real users.

The prototype step can have multiple stages, from initial sketches, to wireframes, to actual working prototypes, all the way to beta versions that are available for a limited number of public downloads. The team may even create multiple prototypes if they’re not certain which idea will fly with users.

Test

Once the prototype is created, the team must learn — from real users — what works, what doesn’t, and then focus on iteration. To make the most of the testing stage, it’s absolutely crucial for the team to have in place mechanisms to gather and assess feedback. The more detailed the feedback is, the better the chances of fine-tuning any little UX issues that could harm the success of the finished product.

During the testing phase, it’s important that the testers not be coached or steered toward a certain type of feedback. Ideally, the team should refrain from telling testers what the purpose of the site or app is, or how it works. If testers can figure it out easily and accurately without any guidance, the UX is definitely on the right track. On the other hand, if the testers are confused about what the app or site is for, or how to use it, then both the messaging and the UX need some work.

The principles of design thinking can be applied to a multitude of challenges, and these principles truly shine when they’re applied toward the UX design of a website or application. By following a proven process that involves, above all, listening to the user, teams can create a finished product that will be enthusiastically embraced, adopted, and used for years.

Contact us now and find out how Mobomo's approach to design can benefit you.

• Read more about The Latest In UX/ UI Design

UX and UI are distinct parts of the design process, but they are so closely intertwined that one couldn’t possible exist without the other. Let’s start by defining the two so that we don’t get confused.

“User Experience” is a very broad term, but for the purpose of this discussion, let's define it simply as the engagement between the product and it’s user.  UX in the digital realm is constantly evolving as the user base expands and as technological advancements allow user engagements to become incredibly efficient.  Think of a simple question to lookup:  “When will the next president be elected?”  Not so very long ago, you would search for a website related to politics, and then you would dig through page after page, desperately looking for the answer.  Today, google will give you the answer immediately, and very efficiently, thus providing an amazing “user experience.”  It seems simple, but from a design perspective, maximizing UX is still an incredibly challenging process.  The success of your applications UX is ultimately dependent upon the purpose of the user, and when you have to accommodate a variety of purposes from a variety of users, it can be very difficult to create a slick UX.

Once the User Experience has been determined, then the “User Interface” or UI comes into play.  Lets use an example to understand UI: we are creating a website for a Pizza restaurant.  We want users to come to our website, see our menu and order a pizza.  A clear goal has already been established by the projected UX: we want you to order pizza.  The specific layout of the webpages will be the User’s interface.  In other words, the UI is the medium for ordering pizza, while the UX is how happy you are while using that medium.  Determining an efficient layout for our website is not an easy task; how do we get the user from the home page to successfully clicking the “place pizza order” button?

There are infinitely many control and style choices.  Early design documents are often so laden with features that their websites’ production could take years to complete.  This can happen if you bury yourself in the user interface.  Like the Yin and Yang, an oreo cookie, or whatever metaphor you choose, such is the natural relationship between UI and UX: the best UI design will occur when you are consistently mindful of the UX, that is, mindful of how the user will experience your site.

There are  few essential rules that go into the creation of intuitive applications.  UI designers are responsible for creating a cohesive style guide; they should maintain a consistent design language throughout the product. The pages of your product must communicate clearly with the projected designs of the UX.

Now that we have established the basics, what are the top UX/UI tools being used in the dev industry?

For a pre-test fee, UserTesting is a stress and hassle free tool. It can be utilized for user research and prototype testing.  Testing experts can recruit the target audience for your application, remotely administer user tests, and deliver the results within an hour.  The test records video footage of the user in order to gauge facial expressions and emotional responses to your application.

With Stylify Me you can copy the color hue of any website.  When you enter the URL in the top search menu it reveals the exact HEX values for that site.

With UXPin  you can design a website or app from start to finish. UXPin allows the user to develop lo-fi wireframes into a hi-fi prototype.  UXPin provides drag and drop tools for UX interactivity, creating codeless animations, and for designing UI Patterns.  UXPin works with Photoshop and Sketch so that you can convert static files into interactive prototypes without losing layers.

Sketch has very similar features to Photoshop, but Sketch was specifically designed as an image editor for digital design, while Photoshop has a broader set of tasks.  Sketch uses CSS logic from the start, which makes for an easier transition into development.  Sketch also has an auto-cropping feature and one-click exports into various formats.  Sketch has easy navigation and convenient developer tools.

Photoline is a little less well-known, it’s a little cheaper, but it still offers some useful features like photo manipulation, nondestructive layering, vector editing, and desktop publishing.  It also has multi-layered importing and exporting for EXR.

Optimizely is another tool that provides user testing, but it only does A/B testing.  A/B testing compares usage data from two different versions of your product.  A/B testing can help guide production decisions and early experimentation.

Once you have selected a color scheme, Color Safe helps you select the best contrast balance for readability.  Improving legibility through color contrast is essential for creating an amazing UX.

XMind is a free app that is used for brainstorming.  It uses open-ended “mind mapping” tools for creating diagrams.  Xmind is an excellent task manager for keeping organized.  The visual setup allows for quick comprehension, and for easily customizing your goals.

Mural is a digital whiteboard with efficient tools for collaboratively designing the UX.  Your team can use Mural to brainstorm and organize concepts.  It supports files from Youtube, Vimeo Slideshare, Google Drive, and Evernote.

Google made Resizer to help devs create responsive layouts. Google describes it as an interactive viewer.  Resizer is intended to test for Material Design breakpoints across desktop, mobile, and tablet.  Resizer can populate the website from any URL into a variety of layouts.  Then you can see which layouts work best for each screen size.

What do you think the future of design will look like?

• Read more about Why are Large Retailer Websites Impossible to Navigate?

The other night my wife was browsing the GAP(gap.com) website, itching to spend her “gap bucks”. She asked if I needed anything and as I browsed through the site looking at clothes I didn’t need, but maybe wanted, I found a constant, frustrating theme throughout…this site was not designed for anyone to actually use. Let me clarify below…

In The Beginning…

Let’s start at the beginning of any website, the homepage. It seems that on many large retail sites immediately upon landing you are bombarded with the latest trends in e-commerce sites, a full page interstitial takeover, begging you sign up for their newsletter for an extra XX% off your purchase.

After dismissing the popup you are able to actually land on the homepage, though almost wishing the popup would return, so there was a clear message or action to take. The sheer amount of available options is overwhelming. I wasn’t sure when looking at the homepage, if GAP wanted me to:

Since I am a professional designer but also a user, when I go to a clothing site to purchase something, that’s all I want to do…purchase that item. I hope that retailer websites such as GAP improves their site so it's easier to navigate, because who doesn't love a good sweater or pair or pants from GAP?

On the flip side I do understand the need from a marketing perspective to answer consumer needs and questions that may relate to the aforementioned list. But surely there is an alternative approach to providing people that info.

Perhaps as someone goes through the shopping experience you can lay these bits of content out in appropriate spots. How about when I add an item to my cart? Why not present me with a coupon option then. Or maybe offer me recommendations of other brand items I might like after the checkout process, perhaps on a thank you screen or in my email confirmation. Crafting a breadcrumb trail like this, and targeting people to take action at the right time, could inevitably lead to more e-commerce sales.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter though, because design at it’s core is about solving problems. And if GAP has found that the way their site is structured solves the problems of their users, that’s all that matters.